News & Events

What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small
City is now in print. The book by Frank Felsenstein and James J.
Connolly has been published by the University of Massachusetts Press. The
book is based on the Center’s What Middletown Read database and the entire
project received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ball
State University, and the Gladys Kreible Delmas Foundation. The NEH name
it one of its top 50 funded projects as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. For
more details and ordering information, go here.
Felsentein and Connolly will speak about the book at the Tucson Festival of Books on March
12th, 2016.

The University of Toronto is publishing Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis, a collection of
essays originally prepared for the Center’s 2013 conference of the same title.
More details about the book and ordering information can be found here.

Changing Gears: End of an Era, the documentary film
examining the closure of Muncie’s BorgWarner factory and UAW Local 287 is now available for viewing via the BSU Digital Media Repository.

Work on Virtual Middletown, a three-dimensional digital
recreation of Muncie, Indiana, during the 1920s and 1890s based on Robert and
Helen Lynd’s Middletown: A Study in American Culture (1929),
continues. Working with IDIA and Doug Seefeldt of the History Department,
we developed a 3D visualization of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of
Rough Riders based on its appearance in Muncie in 1899. The Wild West was
an enormously popular touring show that drew large crowds at it traveled across
the U.S. and Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. This project was funded by the Buffalo Bill Center of the West
and Ball State University’s Advance program. The project group is
currently planning additional modules.

Rich Usdowski and Warren Vander Hill completed the Muncie
High School Consolidation project during the fall of 2015. The collection includes video recordings and
transcripts of conversations with local residents and civic leaders about the
decision to combine high schools in the city and its significance for the
community. The interviews can be found online here.